Anime – Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha (Original and A’s)
Song – KOTOKO – We Survive (short ver.)
Completed May 2006
Premiered July 7, 2006
AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link
The first time I watched Nanoha, I remember thinking that the action scenes were better than any other magical girl series I’d seen. That impression was confirmed and significantly enhanced during the second season, which had even better battle scenes (with more than twice as many people involved in the combat, things can be much more interesting). So when I decided that I wanted to do a combat-action video, Nanoha was the first thing that jumped into my mind.
The music was much harder. I wanted a fast, driving song, but fairly upbeat, and without long slower sections. I decided that I wanted to use a KOTOKO track after some deliberation, and was having difficulty deciding between “Oblivion” and “Face of Fact,” though both had the problem that they petered out pretty badly at their ends. I decided to dig through my collection one more time, and found that I had missed “We Survive,” the opening to VG Neo, on the first pass through. The long version, from the GIGA Opening Collection CD, felt like it was too long to carry the action the whole way through, but the short version was still available on the company website, and was perfect for the length and feel that I wanted.
Most of the editing was done without a major plan in mind, just general blocks that I wanted certain characters to dominate. My main goal was to make the action flow, and almost every clip was replaced at least once before finding a good scene for the music.
The text effects of the characters and their devices were fun to do, as finding a font that looked similar to the official Nanoha font took some time. The spellings of Raising Heart, Bardiche, Laevatein, and Graf Eisen are all official, from the device cards in the Nanoha A’s DVDs. The spellings of Chrono’s and Fate’s last names, Signum, and Vita are all from Triad’s subs, as I couldn’t find an official spelling. I admit that the actual “light” that reveals the text looks kind of lame if you pause the video and look at it, but my skills at generating my own static images are pretty lacking, and they’re only on the screen for about a third of a second at a time, so it still looks okay. Something to work on for my next videos, though.
There is one shot at about 0:40 that isn’t from Nanoha or Nanoha A’s, but from the Triangle Heart ~Sweet Songs Forever~ Soundstage VA, which is a collection of music videos from around the Triangle Heart series, made as a promotion for the then-upcoming OVA series. Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha started out as a sidestory game to the Triangle Heart games, and was apparently vastly different from the series, if the video from TH~SSF~ is any indication, including a distinctly different device, a fairy-form Lindy, and Chrono apparently as the bad guy of the game. Having the DVD available to me, I couldn’t resist putting at least one small segment from Nanoha’s roots in the video.
Convention History:
Animethon 13 (2006) – Runner-Up, Best Action
Otakon 2006 – Finalist
Anime Evolution 2006 – Finalist
Bakuretsucon 2006 – Finalist